Trust the Tale Rather than the Teller: The Painted Bird

The edition of The Painted Bird that I read had an introduction by its author, Jerzy Kosinski, that explained in great length the initial public response to its publication in 1965. It was the height of the Cold War and Communist Poland attack Kosinski brutally for his portrayal of Polish peasants during World War II. Others accused him of profiteering from the Holocaust; still others said the story was plagiarized. Faint memories of these headlines surfaced, drowned out by my association of his name with Roman Polanski and the Manson murders. The introduction tainted my venturing into the book.

But today, while reading another introduction, this one written by John Bayley, to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Bayley quotes D. H. Lawrence: “trust the tale rather than the teller.” And reading The Painted Bird decades after it’s blaring headlines, the story holds up quite well as a tale.

In a year where I am reading only picaresque novels for the Slackers’ Blog, I do not expect such outlandish fantasies to be essentially autobiographical. But as a budding author, and after several years devotion to memoirs and biographies, I still search for the kernel of personal experience that affects and directs a writer’s themes and plots. So sure, Kosinski was a young boy in Poland during the War and even before that horror, certainly knew first hand about the poverty, myths, and distrust of strangers found in isolated communities across his country.

Picaresque writing is intentionally exaggerated. I one analysis that insists it has always been a marginalized, suspect genre. Another analysis claims by writing about political and social rascals the author intends to foster their downfall via satire.

Given my ten elements of picaresque writing, The Painted Bird aligns with most of them and falls into this category. I especially liked how the unnamed young protagonist, especially early on in the story, attributes the cosmic reasons causing his abuse: whether it is primal witchery, organized religion, or Communism. Clearly, initially, the boy’s maltreatment is not of his making. He looks different and the peasants label him as either an orphan gypsy or Jew and he suffers accordingly. What is more troubling to me, and at this point in my annual escapade strikes me as a non-picaresque feature, is the eventual attraction to perpetuating insult and torture on others as he enters his teen years … certainly a real consequence of cruelty and domestic violence that is much more acknowledged now than in the mid-60s. With the boy not obtaining enlightenment, the reader is left with the conclusion that yet another generation of hatred comes out of the War.

Slacker Hamagrael read The Painted Bird years ago and is not going to reread it, given the exhaustive list of other novels. She wrote to tell me she still remembers the boy swinging his lantern to scare away wolves and bullies. The adventures are highly visual and I will recall most the boy floating down the creek on the fish bladder, a dark take on Pecos Bill on his catfish.

Finally, I was troubled by the boy’s reunification with his parents. Kosinski uses the metaphor of the bird whose feathers were painted over by a trapper and when subsequently released back to the flock, is not recognized but viciously attacked. The boy is viewed throughout the story as an outsider and assaulted because he is foreign. His coloration because of the War has to be camouflage; yet when his parents can identify him by his “markings,” he does not want to reenter the family. He prefers the “colors” of his gang-like undisciplined peers.